Physics House - Netflix

Editor

Join Yanick in the Physics House to take a look at the physics
behind everyday phenomena we encounter in our homes.

Type: Documentary

Languages: English

Status: Running

Runtime: 10 minutes

Premier: 2017-05-01

Physics House - Albert Einstein - Netflix

Albert Einstein (; German: [ˈalbɛɐ̯t ˈʔaɪnʃtaɪn] ( listen); 14 March 1879
– 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed
the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics
(alongside quantum mechanics). His work is also known for its influence
on the philosophy of science. He is best known to the general public for
his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which has been dubbed “the
world's most famous equation”. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in
Physics “for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his
discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect”, a pivotal step in the
development of quantum theory. Near the beginning of his career,
Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to
reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the
electromagnetic field. This led him to develop his special theory of
relativity during his time at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern
(1902–1909), Switzerland. However, he realized that the principle of
relativity could also be extended to gravitational fields, and he
published a paper on general relativity in 1916 with his theory of
gravitation. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics
and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and
the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of
light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917,
he applied the general theory of relativity to model the structure of
the universe. He lived in Switzerland between 1895 and 1914, except for
one year in Prague, and he received his academic diploma from the Swiss
federal polytechnic school (later the Eidgenössische Technische
Hochschule, ETH) in Zürich in 1900. He taught theoretical physics there
between 1912 and 1914 before he left for Berlin. He acquired Swiss
citizenship in 1901, which he kept for the rest of his life after being
stateless for more than five years. In 1905, he was awarded a PhD by the
University of Zurich. The same year, he published four groundbreaking
papers during his renowned annus mirabilis (miracle year) which brought
him to the notice of the academic world at the age of 26. He was
visiting the United States when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 and
he did not go back to Germany, where he had been a professor at the
Berlin Academy of Sciences. He settled in the United States and became
an American citizen in 1940. On the eve of World War II, he endorsed a
letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting him to the potential
development of “extremely powerful bombs of a new type” and recommending
that the US begin similar research. This eventually led to the Manhattan
Project. Einstein supported the Allied forces, but he generally
denounced the idea of using nuclear fission as a weapon. He signed the
Russell–Einstein Manifesto with British philosopher Bertrand Russell,
which highlighted the danger of nuclear weapons. He was affiliated with
the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, until his
death in 1955. Einstein published more than 300 scientific papers and
more than 150 non-scientific works. His intellectual achievements and
originality have made the word “Einstein” synonymous with “genius”.
Eugene Wigner wrote of Einstein in comparison to his contemporaries that
“Einstein's understanding was deeper even than Jancsi von Neumann's. His
mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And
that is a very remarkable statement.”

Physics House - Gravitational waves - Netflix

In 1916, Einstein predicted gravitational waves, ripples in the
curvature of spacetime which propagate as waves, traveling outward from
the source, transporting energy as gravitational radiation. The
existence of gravitational waves is possible under general relativity
due to its Lorentz invariance which brings the concept of a finite speed
of propagation of the physical interactions of gravity with it. By
contrast, gravitational waves cannot exist in the Newtonian theory of
gravitation, which postulates that the physical interactions of gravity
propagate at infinite speed. The first, indirect, detection of
gravitational waves came in the 1970s through observation of a pair of
closely orbiting neutron stars, PSR B1913+16. The explanation of the
decay in their orbital period was that they were emitting gravitational
waves. Einstein's prediction was confirmed on 11 February 2016, when
researchers at LIGO published the first observation of gravitational
waves, detected on Earth on 14 September 2015, exactly one hundred years
after the prediction.